Comment by eru
7 months ago
LLMs are great for the poor!
If you are rich, you can afford a good mentor. (That's true literally, in the sense of being rich in money and paying for a mentor. But also more metaphorically for people rich in connections and other resources.)
If you are poor, you used to be out of luck. But now everyone can afford a nearly-free mentor in the form of an LLM. Of course, at the moment the LLM-mentor is still below the best human mentors. But remember: only rich people can afford these. The alternative for poor people was essentially nothing.
And AI systems are only improving.
If people are using it to critically question their beliefs and thinking, that is.
However, most of the hype around LLMs is that they take out the difficult task of thinking and allow the creation of the artifact (documents, code or something else) that is really dangerous.
How is it any worse than the status quo for the disenfranchised?
A public library is actually free and its contents, collectively, are a far better "mentor" than ChatGPT. Plus the library doesn't build a psychological profile on you while you use it.
ChatGPT ain't taking libraries away. It's just an addition to your toolbox.
However, we notice that in practice free public libraries are mostly welfare for the well-off: they are mostly used by people who are at least middle-class.